Teen sentenced to 10 years of hard church

If there’s a time in one’s life fraught with tragedy, it’s probably the hormone saturated period in our lives known as our ‘teen years’. How many of us have done something so incredibly stupid it still haunts us today? Tyler Alred will need to live with the fact his drunk driving took the life of his friend and passenger, 16-year-old John Luke Dum. He’ll also need to spend the next decade going to church regularly, lest he break the conditions of his sentence:

An Oklahoma teen convicted of manslaughter has sentenced to 10 years of probation, with requirements that include regularly attending church….In deferring the sentence, the judge not only ordered Alred to a decade of church attendance, but also required him to finish high school and welding school.

Alred’s attorney and the victim’s family agreed to the terms of the sentence.

Now I know the family has actually agreed to it (mostly because it seems to oblige their son NOT to become a high school dropout loser), but it doesn’t change the fact even the judge realized how unconstitutional the whole thing was. Nevertheless, he thought it wise to include a sentence forcing the young man to attend church services for at least 10 years of his life. This sentence is obviously meant to give him structure and discipline, but it’s frustrating people still think religion helps you act more moral. It’s simply not true. In fact, religious can often make you act totally immoral, with the added ‘bonus’ of feeling simultaneously morally superior and thinking your invisible friend is on your side (killing others in his supposed name comes to mind). If anything, he should have ordered the kid to read The God Delusion, since the atheist prison population is disproportionately small. Could you imagine the outrage if he did? Fox News would have a fucking meltdown.